One whole side of the room must often have been formed by the
window. This Ireland mansion, as well as all the rest of the old houses
in Shrewsbury, is a timber house,--that is, a skeleton of oak, filled up
with brick, plaster, or other material, and with the beams of the timber
marked out with black paint; besides which, in houses of any pretension,
there are generally trefoils, and other Gothic-looking ornaments,
likewise painted black. They have an indescribable charm for me,--the
more, I think, because they are wooden; but, indeed, I cannot tell why it
is that I like them so well, and am never tired of looking at them. A
street was a development of human life, in the days when these houses
were built, whereas a modern street is but the cold plan of an architect,
without individuality or character, and without the human emotion which a
man kneads into the walls which he builds on a scheme of his own.
We strolled to a pleasant walk under a range of trees, along the shore of
the Severn. It is called the Quarry Walk. The Severn is a pretty river,
the largest, I think (unless it be such an estuary as the Mersey), that I
have met with in England; that is to say, about a fair stone's-throw
across. It is very gentle in its course, and winds along between grassy
and sedgy banks, with a good growth of weeds in some part of its current.
It has one stately bridge, called the English Bridge, of several arches,
and, as we sauntered along the Quarry Walk, we saw a ferry where the boat
seemed to be navigated across by means of a rope, stretched from bank to
bank of the river.
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